China in our hands

Why should China – now the world’s top polluter – commit to reducing emissions when western countries have failed spectacularly to do so?

Everyone in the climate change community is obsessed with China. The United States may be the great ogre – with massive per capita emissions and a president in denial – but China represents the ominous dark cloud on the horizon, a huge country with a population of 1.5 billion, all of whom aspire to the kind of lifestyle westerners currently enjoy.

This might not matter too much if it was just an aspiration – but with breakneck rates of economic growth (the economy, and carbon emissions, doubled in the last decade) the Chinese are likely to get what they want, perhaps within as little as 30 years from now.

This is the ominous dark cloud. If China achieves the kind of carbon-intensive lifestyle currently enjoyed by Americans, then there is no hope for the planet. And the suddenness of China’s overtaking of the US as the world’s No 1 polluter has surprised everyone – this wasn’t supposed to happen until 2010 at the earliest.

It is significant that the news of China’s rapid advance to No 1 in the global emissions league table comes just a couple of months after the international scientific community warned that we may have as little as eight years left to peak and begin reducing global emissions if the world is to avoid crossing the danger threshold represented by 2C of warming.

China in our hands